Fable VI
Venus, incensed at the Cerastæ for polluting the island of Cyprus, which is sacred to her, with the human sacrifices which they offer to their Gods, transforms them into bulls; and the Propœtides, as a punishment for their dissolute conduct, are transformed into rocks.
“But if, perchance, you were to ask of Amathus,35 abounding in metals, whether she would wish to have produced the Propœtides; she would deny it, as well as those whose foreheads were of old rugged with two horns, from which they also derived the name of Cerastæ. Before the doors of these was standing an altar of Jupiter Hospes,36 a scene of tragic horrors; if any stranger had seen it stained with blood, he would have supposed that sucking calves had been killed there, and Amathusian sheep;37 strangers were slain there. Genial Venus, offended at the wicked sacrifices there offered, was preparing to abandon her own cities and the Ophiusian lands.38 ‘But how,’ said she, ‘have these delightful spots, how have my cities offended? What criminality is there in them? Let the inhuman race rather suffer punishment by exile or by death, or if there is any middle course between death and exile; and what can that be, but the punishment of changing their shape?’
“While she is hesitating into what she shall change them, she turns her eyes towards their horns, and is put in mind that those may be left to them; and then she transforms their huge limbs into those of fierce bulls.
“And yet the obscene Propœtides presumed to deny that Venus is a Goddess; for which they are reported the first x. 240-251. of all women to have prostituted their bodies,39 with their beauty, through the anger of the Goddess. And when their shame was gone, and the blood of their face was hardened, they were, by a slight transition, changed into hard rocks.”
EXPLANATION.
The Cerastæ, a people of the island of Cyprus, were, perhaps, said to have been changed into bulls, to show the barbarous nature and rustic manners of those islanders, who stained their altars with the blood of strangers, in sacrifice to the Gods.
An equivocation of names also, probably, aided in originating the story. The island of Cyprus is surrounded with promontories which rise out of the sea, and whose pointed rocks appear at a distance like horns, from which it had the name of Cerastis, the Greek word κέρας, signifying a ‘horn.’ Thus, the inhabitants having the name of Cerastæ, it was most easy to invent a fiction of their having been once turned into oxen, to account the more readily for their bearing that name.
The Propœtides, who inhabited the same island, were females of very dissolute character. Justin, and other writers, mention a singular and horrible custom in that island, of prostituting young girls in the very temple of Venus. It was most probably the utter disregard of these women for common decency, that occasioned the poets to say that they were transformed into rocks.